Tuesday 27 August 2013

Two weeks of mayhem

Well its been a couple of weeks since my last post and we have been super busy. Its now 8 weeks till we move to our little house and we are eager to be finished in the flat so we can have a little sit down and enjoy ourselves for a bit until we have to think about packing up and moving (and starting again).

So what have we been up to?

The kitchen is coming along, we have worktops and a working sink (yeay for not more washing up in the bath!) here are soem pictures, though they are not the most current but they are all i have for now.





We have a fridge and freezer that are plugged into an extension lead which allows us to get rid of the old fridge/freezer (still currently sitting in the back room - ahem) The husband has been squirreling away over this bank holiday weekend, get the electrics ready for the electrician to check tomorrow. We are waiting for the doors which are being sprayed, the gas oven has gone and the gas supply capped off (which means that we don't currently have a way of cooking unless its in a microwave) but hopefully once the electrician has been tomorrow we will have an oven, and hopefully a hob soon after.

Oven gone!

Gas supply capped - bolts not undone since the 40's!
Unfortunately the brand new dishwasher is not working (grrrrrr Indesit customer services) so we have to have someone to come round a fix it, or get us a new one - annoying! I have finally managed to find us someone to come and tile, one guy tried to tell us that it was going to take 2 people 3 days and cost £875!!! WHAT? er I don't think so!

So because the kitchen is taking a while we decided to get on with the other stuff and got to work decorating  the back room, stripping out the old skirting boards and replacing them with more modern ones, we have to do this by climbing over the furniture quite a lot because we ran out of space for everything. Our lounge was a kitchen and storage facility for a while which was quite stressful!
Back room whilst being painted

more back room

Lounge/ storage facility!

there is a kitchen in here somewhere

and here

Hallway
So as you can see its been more of a decorating obstacle course than straight forward decorating. I am pleased to say that not only have we decorated and fitted new skirting boards to the back room, but we have decorated the hallway too and we have new carpet coming for the back room this coming weekend, so after Saturday we should have most rooms in our flat back to normal, with only some kitchen to do. I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but now is not the time to loose momentum, must keep pushing to make sure that everything gets done quickly so that we can put our feet up for a bit!! I think we deserve it!

Monday 12 August 2013

Still going..

What an exciting week it has been! As of Wednesday our kitchen has begun its transformation and by the end of Friday it was looking something a little like this...


 Obviously still some way to go but its taking shape and its very exciting to come home from work each day to see the progress.

As all this has been going on indoors, we have been trying to concentrate on finishing the garden which I am proud to say is very nearly finished - just a bit of weeding and planting to do and maybe sort out all the lumps and bumps in the grass. We took a delivery of the largest bag of gravel in the world on Saturday morning and so we were able to finish the steps that we built with the sleepers last weekend. They now look something like this...


We also managed to put the bricks that we salvaged from a skip (along with our neighbour) to good use and built the outline of the path..
So the bit of the garden that once looked like this..
 Went to this..


 and now looks likes this :)
So we are feeling pretty pleased with our little garden now and are very much looking forward to seeing how the kitchen progresses....I will of course keep you up to date.












Monday 5 August 2013

Go go instant garden...sort of

Well what more could i ask more after a busy weekend in the garden than the current shower of rain that is christening my newly planted back border? Excellent (although I am not looking forward to traveling home in it mind...)

This weekend we continued to install the sleepers that were delivered last week, and I can categorically say that even though gardening is supposed to 'keep you young' we both felt incredibly old and broken by the end of it! There still a bit more to go with a path, removal of some rubble and doing something about the lumps and bumps in the grass, but for the most part it is done. Big tick off the list - HOORAY!!

Here are some pictures (hoping to get an aerial view from the neighbors soon).

The back of the flat looked like this

 With the addition of some stepped areas (which still need to be filled with gravel to finish them off) it now looks like this

The back of the garden which you will remember from last week now has plants in it looks like this

 and the side which did look like this

now looks like this